Many people love reading, but when they try to read in another language they find it is not very much fun. According to Paul Nation, a leading researcher in vocabulary acquisition, people reading in another language must know around 98% of the words in the text in order for their reading experience to be enjoyable.
Ninety-eight percent!
But it's true. Imagine reading a book or an article in your own language; if the topic or setting is one that you are not familiar with (E.g. life on the planet Urras and its habitable moon Anarres) you may find a few words that you have never seen before, but there won't be that many, and you can usually skip over them and still understand the writer's intention. L1 (first language) readers in unfamiliar topics (engineering, antique furniture etc.) can usually figure out what these new words mean, and they don't really interrupt the reading experience.
Ninety-eight percent of known words means that there will be two percent of unknown words, right?
Say there are usually ten words to a line of text, then two percent means that out of every hundred words (around ten lines) there will be two unknown words, which means that there is one unknown word every five lines. Assuming an average page has thirty-five lines, this means that there will be seven unknown words on EVERY page.
Does ninety-eight percent still sound too high?
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What do you like reading?
These readers include classic
novels, biographies, sport,
romance, adventure, etc. ...
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Graded Readers!
I am bringing a big box of graded readers with me as I visit schools. There are over a hundred titles in my 'traveling library', and these titles cover a wide range of topics. Do you like sport? Do you like history? Do you like romance? Do you like horror? Do you like biographies? Do you like classic novels? Do you like adventure? Do you like comedy? Whatever you like, I'm sure you'll find something to read that is both easy AND enjoyable.
Graded readers are books written in plain, ordinary English. The kind of English that makes up the major part of almost all written English (reports, newspapers, stories, magazines, emails, letters etc.). Although the English language has a freakishly HUGE vocabulary, we find the same two to three thousand words cropping up all the time - and these are the words that are used in graded readers. If you read widely from the traveling library you will be exposed to the most frequent words of English popping up and describing lots of interesting topics. There are lots of books to borrow, and I encourage you to take a few home with you (or keep them at your desk at work) and spend a little bit of time every day reading something interesting (or funny, or sad, or exciting) in English. If you read frequently and widely from the 'traveling library' you will be making a huge step in improving your own English reading and writing skills at the same time as relaxing with a book and having fun!
Stephen-Peter Jinks (ELC, Jerantut)
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